SEOUL, South Korea — Few Koreans would turn down freshwater eel: Deboned, dipped in flour and deep fried, it is a special treat. Lee Ae-ran, however, won’t touch the dish. “When I see it, my heart grows heavy,” she says.

It reminds her too much of the fateful autumn evening in 1974, when a loud rap on her family’s apartment door in Pyongyang, North Korea, came as they sat down to a dinner of eel. It was an officer of the feared State Security Bureau.

He gruffly told the family that Ms. Lee’s father, a bureaucrat, was needed for a “great socialist construction project” in remote, rugged Ryanggang Province in the north. Several men barged in and began roughly packing the family’s possessions.

Only later would Ms. Lee learn what had happened.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, authorities began investigating people whose documents had been lost amid the 1950-53 Korean War. They discovered that Ms. Lee’s paternal grandparents had escaped to the South.

That thrust the Lees out of the comfortable “loyal” class and into the despised “hostile” class.

Banished from the relative comforts of Pyongyang into rural exile in an austere mountain hamlet, the Lees would suffer the murderous famines of the 1990s – euphemistically known in today’s North Korea as “The Arduous March.”

She remembers washing mold off rice crackers, meals of potato skin scraps, rice soaked in kerosene and bean stalks “that even cattle would not eat.”

Today, Ms. Lee runs a restaurant on a quiet hillside perched just minutes from Seoul’s downtown, and in May published her memoir, “One Meal, One Memory: The Taste of Survival in North Korean Cuisine.”

For Ms. Lee, culinary phrasing takes on new meanings. Complaints lead to people disappearing, “like evaporating steam.”

Beyond food, she recalls conditions inside the world’s most insulated state.

Persons with “greasy hands” – party elite – abused their privileges, from demanding bribes to sexually assaulting individuals. Victims who resisted suffered crippling imprisonment — some were forced to kneel in cells, year after year — under false pretenses.

An “Assault Corps” was not a military unit, but a forced labor mobilization. Tasks were battles: “bracken battles” to gather ferns; “production battles” to build a rail line.

Childhood was no defense against the state.

Lessons were canceled and school children were driven into mountains to gather ingredients for bibimbap on overgrown trails infested with snakes.

A group of runaways, imprisoned in a crowded, underground cell, were thrashed with leather belts until their skin split. Only bribes from family members could secure release.

Ms. Lee was humiliated in front of her class by her teacher when she expressed hopes of attending college. She was told her parents’ “lowly life” made her ineligible – a realization that drove her to attempt suicide.

Resilience was desperate but creative.

Tobacco resin and match heads were applied to disinfect wounds. Poppy seeds boiled in water became opiate anesthetics. Raw starch was used to stem diarrhea.

Rural banishment was tough enough. The situation became dramatically worse in the 1990s.

After the Soviet Union imploded, North Korea lost privileged trade and suffered failed harvests and floods. Resultant famines may have killed more than 10% of the populace.

Ms. Lee’s memories are harrowing.

Feral orphans massed outside rail stations. She watched a group fighting over a boiled rat – valuable nutrition — and observed people trying to feed a starving boy. He died in front of her.

She was offered an 18-month-old baby by a desperate old woman, and she witnessed a malnourished family eating fruit rinds thrown into the Yalu River. She learned the bodies of the starved were trucked out of towns and dumped, without funerals, in the mountains.

She relates the story of a starving, hallucinating man who murdered, butchered and stewed his 9-year-old son, thinking he was a piglet.

He was executed.

These horrors, Ms. Lee recalls, took place as dictator Kim Jong Il was constructing a massive, ornate mausoleum for his deceased father, Kim Il Sung, while TV broadcasts hailed a “socialist paradise.”

As black markets, selling goods ranging from smuggled Chinese food to firewood, took over from the collapsed state distribution system, a new phrase was intoned: “To preserve socialism, we must practice capitalism.”

Street snacks that conveniently combined protein and carbohydrates – chunks of fried tofu, stuffed with rice – were invented.

Even in showpiece capital Pyongyang, apartment elevators and plumbing failed. Unwilling to use basement toilets, exhausted residents of upper floors defecated into paper and dropped the waste off balconies onto streets.

Ms. Lee recalls a 19-year-old who did not know what an egg was and laments that famine wiped classic dishes off menus.

“In the past, beef dishes like bulgogi were really famous in the North,” she says. “Now, most people have not even smelled it.”

She defected to the South in 1997.

There, she was stunned by the amounts of food served and by the culinary diversity. In Pyongyang, the only non-native eateries were Chinese, as well as one Russian and one “Western” restaurant.

In Seoul, she could not eat her first steak. “It was rare and bloody, and I was not used to beef,” she recalls.

She leveraged past experiences – her mother had been a chef in Pyongyang, and in her “Assault Corps,” she had cooked for the laborers – to open her restaurant “Nong Rae Bab Sang,” named after a willowed island in Pyongyang’s Daedong River. 

Diners have included former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and ex-U.K. Premier Theresa May.

Her book published this year aimed, from the outset, to differ from other defector accounts.

“They write about political prisons and defections, which is hard for ordinary South Koreans to accept,” she says. “I thought food was a more natural way to talk about human rights.”

In addition to her culinary career, her activities have included being the first defector to run for political office – unsuccessfully – and berating North Korean cheerleaders who attended the 2018 Pyongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea. (They ignored her.)  

It is widely believed that North Korean food security has improved since the 1990s. The United Nations estimates that 10.7 million of North Korea’s 25.9 million people are malnourished, and 18% of children are stunted — but it does not mention starvation.

And, as of this year, Moscow has been exporting food to Pyongyang.

Ms. Lee, the first North Korean female to earn a doctorate from a South Korean University – in food and nutrition at Ewha Womans University — is unconvinced.

“They don’t have the food resources to improve,” she said, referring to North Korea’s geographical unsuitability for agriculture.

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.